Scored in the Key of Leisure

LARB presents an excerpt from Dorothy’s upcoming reissue of Renee Gladman’s “To After That (TOAF).”

By Renee GladmanSeptember 15, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Literary Criticism

• Nonfiction

“LET ME SEE IT,” as strange as this sounds, was my first thought when I returned home this evening. Hours before—having printed the last page of the manuscript and prepared to flee the house—I had written “After That: a novella” across the title page, then I ran outside. When I was about a block from home I turned around and came back. I pulled the manuscript out again—a crisp stack of 97 very white, very smooth pages—and scribbled in black ink “When I was a poet” just under the title to qualify things. I changed my outfit, adding a new, more versatile layer (a hooded sweatshirt), and left my house decidedly. I was outside; the relief I felt was tremendous.

In the summer of 1998, I set out to write a book that when completed would weigh three pounds. I did not know what else I wanted. It might even have been 1999 that I started the book. I have nothing conclusive to lock its inception in place. This book would concern my favorite subject—the problem of the person in time and space—and would flow from the farthest left margin to the farthest right, the way novels did in bookstores. But its story—the exact parameters of it—I did not deem necessary to know right then, as this was my first novel, and would be a ghost book.

Luswage Amini, the great Ravickian novelist, once conferred to an interviewer: the first novel will be given to you from the remains of some other’s long-lost project. Despite how this sounds—to my ears, a bit foreboding and overwrought—I was not afraid of the inheritance. It was not unlike the moment one finally opened one’s mouth—past the babbling stage of life—to speak. That language I emitted, those many years ago, though it was peppered with resistance, it was somebody else’s language. It was even somebody else’s resistance. So I addressed the blank pages of my journal, place where I was to write the first draft of the book, as one would the top half of the receiver to a telephone. That is, I put my ear to the left side of the journal and transcribed on the right.

I began the book, “For as long as I can remember …” and wrote steadily for an hour. Something odd was happening to my life, which nearly distracted me from my purpose. It seemed that the time elapsing inside the narrative I was writing did not match that which elapsed outside, in that place where I sat. And though this did not affect me physically, it made me extremely conscious of everything falling away into folds. I wrote until I landed on the words, “Where the heat settles and the water is hot,” and closed the journal without further incident. I had six pages of apparition between the leather covers that bound the book in my hands, and that seemed to be enough.

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As I wanted to get across in my novella, I lived in a city of rough surfaces that left patterns on you. Where they marked you depended on how closely you embraced them. Along the sides of my body (moving vertically) and on both sides of my hands (these moving every-which-way) were scratched permanently the lines to my story of that city. I think on my body the surface of every building is imprinted. And it is not just that I loved to touch concrete, I sought to sit on it as well. It was my custom to nest on cemented squares, in patches of sun, on the avenues of downtown. Well, now I remember that, at the very least, my book would be about concrete.

The fact of having written six pages previous to now sitting at a table over coffee made everything I thought subsequently glimmer. Everything I thought seemed to belong in the book. I wrote furiously on napkins, no choice without my journal, which I had left at home (I could have asked someone for paper, but I didn’t want to go through society to get to my work, plus I liked the picture: Black girl scrawling desperately on napkin upon napkin. What that must have looked like. What a lone Black girl might be thinking). I was deeply silent those minutes. It was more than that I did not talk to anyone or that I held myself (other than my hand and my arm) still, it was that I did not breathe, my blood did not flow. I wanted to connect the six pages to these eight or 10 napkins, and it seemed the only way for that to happen was to diminish as a person, to be lifeless for that long moment. In those minutes, I begged the napkins to relate themselves to the gestures I had already made. It had happened before that something I’d thought was a continuance to a piece of writing I’d left at home was, when I had brought the two together, another thing entirely.

I stopped writing after napkin 19 and left that café. I had never walked through the city with so much ephemera on hand. I mean napkins are ephemera no matter what is written on them. I walked along South Street with, I imagine, an odd expression on my face, probably smiling, probably snapping my fingers. When later that night I copied the new text into my journal, I was thrilled to find that I had amassed 15 pages. One page short of my previous novel attempts, and these pages I knew were only the beginning.

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The impulse to write woke me the next morning. But how could I slow this down? I knew the experience had to be different. To write something completely unlike anything I had written before, I would have to alter my process. I could not pour into the page, as was my instinct. However, controlling myself proved to be impossible. At the end of that first hour of writing, I had invented a whole world. There was a film, a day of tasks, and a cell phone.

For years since, I have tried to put a name to the mood that descends upon me after such repeated bursts of writing. It is exhilarating to be drenched in this way, but at the same time frustrating, not unlike excessive masturbation, where instead of becoming more relaxed the more you come, you find yourself weary and hungrier. I was disappointed that I could not write as a novelist, with plans and foresight, and that I wrote impulsively like a poet. I wrote with obsession, bent over my journal, “coming” and chastising myself for coming.

It soon became obvious that parts of the book—perhaps even the overall project of the book—were intent on working out the idea of sequence. It appeared that the notion of events moving along a system of succession, one like time (although there are other such systems), was a natural preoccupation for a student living in an urban location. This is not how I thought of myself then but seems all right to say today. Then, the designation “student,” much less “graduate student,” was difficult to occupy when your school stood on an ordinary city block, consisting of two buildings that faced each other from opposite sides of the street, and roll was never called. I had been a student from 1989 to 1993, a college student, now I was a poet. But I was an extremely outdoor poet with a lot of things to do. I lived with my dog Eva. The books in all the stores were calling me. I had to get my coffee. My burritos. I had to sit on this step and lounge on that piece of grass. The lifestyle I adopted required filling up a day with pursuit and leisure, but at such a tempo it was difficult to say which was which.

And writing took place somewhere in between. Writing was about returning home “half the person” and looking into the space of language for a refill. But not just to put back what the outside had taken, also to add some new information. To graft that day’s terrain onto the previously accumulated—so to make a great big map. In those days it did seem possible to incorporate life.

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The city in which I lived during the writing of the novella After That was concrete and exhausting but also special, beautiful. On many of the streets I did not know the language. The corner stores seemed bursting with fruit. In fact, they were bursting, spilling out onto sidewalks, protected from the sun by tarps. Their labels bore prices but rarely names. To buy them, you had to make a clown of the body, using your hands and feet to indicate shapes and color. I traversed that concrete city with both hands: one stretched toward oncoming traffic, the other bringing snacks to my lips. Crossing the street was atrocious.

Yet I would wake and write this novel, and I would stay up late and write it. But I was not alone; there was a lover, who knew me. I brought her into the novella and named her Frog. Today she is called Chubby. It was to her, six years later, that I dedicated the book. I wrote: For Chubby, the first to come. That is to say, the first to be moved to masturbate upon finishing it, which apparently she did on her bed, in a swath of sun.

The book I was writing was scored in the key of leisure, in the way I had leisure as a student. But at no time in the year of that first draft did I actually have leisure. Then, I explained the discrepancy to myself as “There is fiction and then again there is life.” But I knew it was ridiculous and even trite to think in such a way. Because before I had the time to complete such a thought, the one had already become the other. This is another thing I wanted to say in the novella After That.

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This is an excerpt from Renee Gladman’s To After That (TOAF), which will be reissued on September 17 by Dorothy.